What is joy if not for the freedom to be. And what is freedom, if not for the pleasure of doing little things that matter. Think of living in fear, in trepidation...clothed in misgiving all your life. In reality, that’s a woman’s life. Questioning the rationality of this are five short films in different Indian languages screened at the Suchitra Film Society on Women’s Day. Spearheading the venture was JustFemme, an online magazine, or e-zine, that highlights women’s issues. Five issues old, JustFemme promises to do more than this in the future.
“This is the first time that JustFemme is organising a film festival. Just Femme, the e-zine is just five issues old and has a lot of women interacting in that space. So we thought we should try and create a similar platform out in the real world. Cinema is the best medium for it. And it happened at the film festival,” says Padmalatha Ravi, founder and editor of the e-zine.
An hour long Charitra by Nilanjan Dutta and Soma Ghosh takes you through the making of a film on rape victims and survivors. Interspersed with candid admission from some of the victims on the insensitivity they endured, the film weaves the theme around a filmmaker and an actress who go on a reality check. They go as far as Shutia, a village bordering West Bengal where more than 100 women were raped at gunpoint and looted. When the filmmaker himself starts to lose his bearings and thinks of ravishing the actress, the film takes an ugly turn. At the end, you are left to wonder which is the stronger sex – the one that succumbs easily to the raging hormones or the one that survives the upheaval.
Do you know how we feel? Aaaaargh!, a 20-minute-film from Woman’s Place Project, directed by four junior college students from Mumbai – Divya Sharma, Anita Atgamkar, Richa Dudani and Angela Nagarajan – questions the incongruity of holding girls responsible for boys being boys. Putting across the idea through opinions of people across the age, the film ends with the girls coming together in a tap dance on the roadside. Exploring the gender stereotype is director Arif Mohammed’s Play, Boy a 12-minute-film on an eight-year-old girl who snoops around her teenage brother and his friends cooped up in her brother’s room all the time. In her naive explorations of her brother and his friends’ favourite pastime, she ends up designing her own ‘play boy’ that leaves the audience in splits.
A docu-drama on two women – Malati Marandi and Saraswati Oraon in West Bengal’s Jhilimili village who spearheaded a campaign against bonded labour or namal, Dui Konya is directed by Ladly Mukhopadhaya and is 30m long. Where’s Sandra? takes a playful look at a Christian girl from Mumbai who likes to wear a dress and dance. There were also theatre presentations from Christ College students at the amphitheatre in the premises of the film society.
According to Padmalatha, the film festival has got a very good response from the women who watched it and this has encouraged them to make this an annual event. “We’ve had lot of women writing in to us saying how they went back with ideas from the films and discussed them with friends and family – like the stigma attached to rape or how eve-teasing is considered common and sometimes even accepted. We are planning to make it an annual event with a lot more films,” she says.
